The Last Laugh

by Arjuna Ardagh

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Charles. Charles Dee.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Joey. “And where do you hail from?”

  “I live up in Bellingham.”

  “You a sailor?” The question seemed disjointed.

  “No, actually, chocolates.” He said the word with relish, as one might say it to a child to convey the sense of a special treat. “I’m in the chocolate business.”

  “A chocolate salesman, eh? Brought any samples?” Joey’s eyes lit up.

  “Well, I’m not a salesman. I stumbled into the business from my family. Not much good at anything else, actually. We have a little business up there.”

  “A little business” was modest indeed. Dee’s chocolates are the Rolls Royce of confectionary. Sold in gold boxes with ribbons, and a price tag to match.

  “Ah,” said Joey. He stopped laughing, straightened his back, and paid much closer attention to Charles, in a caricature of “If I’m a good boy, can I … ?” He glanced around the rest of the room, as if on the lookout for competition, then turned back. “I’ve been waiting for you forever,” he whispered. The more serious he got about his chocolate heir, the more the rest of us laughed.

  He looked affronted by our laughter and suddenly sobered. “So what are you doing here?”

  “Not on chocolate business, I’m afraid. Been taking part in a little skydiving event.”

  “Skydiving?” Joey leaned forward in his chair again. “Now that’s something I’ve never tried. That’s jumping out of planes and stuff, isn’t it?” Charlie nodded. “Is there an age limit, do you suppose?”

  Charles looked a little embarrassed. He was straining to satisfy. “Don’t think so. You need to be fairly fit though. Requires some strength in the upper body.”

  Joey pulled up his shirtsleeve to expose a fairly impressive bicep.

  “Yes,” Charlie laughed. “That will do fine.”

  “Good,” said Joey. “We’ll talk afterward.”

  Not long after, Joey rose, mumbled his “KYSH,” and left the room, back in his private rapture. I was first up, and on my way to the door. Becca would be waiting. I had my shoes on, and was halfway down the stairs, when Alan called me back.

  “Matt,” he called. “Could he have a word?”

  I turned back. Was my heart pounding from the increased exercise? I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to regain the calm I had felt as I was leaving. I stood for a moment and looked at Alan, lost.

  “You know where to go,” he smiled, and went back into the meeting room.

  The door was not fully closed, so I pushed it open. Joey was sitting bent over a yellow pad, covered in his scrawl. Next to it on the low table was his glass of chocolate milk. He carefully dipped his finger into the glass, then wiped it across the bottom corner of the pad, as though finger painting. I cleared my throat; he jumped.

  “Eh!” he exclaimed, and squinted at me, not so much to ask, Who are you?, more like, Which planet is this?

  “Wait outside till I’m ready.” I did as I was told.

  When I heard him grunt again, I entered, tentatively. Joey was sprawled in his chair, eyes closed. The satiated look on his face made him appear drunk, or otherwise intoxicated. The yellow pad was empty now, and on top of it was an envelope, with more of his writing across it.

  “You’ve done well,” he said, not even opening his eyes. “You’ve done well. The seeds are sown. The fascination with yourself is almost gone now. Everything else will happen on its own. You have reached the end of the futile attempt to improve yourself, and only from here can real evolution begin.” He opened his eyes and looked into me. They had never seemed so brilliantly blue. Nor had he ever before seemed so strong and fragile at the same time. He was older, and at the same time much younger, like a small child. He was speaking to me from a threshold, already leaning backward over the edge of the abyss. I glanced at the envelope, wondering if it was for me. He scowled, and immediately turned it over.

  “There are no more questions,” he said. It was halfway between a statement and a plea. I shook my head, no. “All that remains now is to give it away,” he went on. “You will never be the human being people want you to be. You will never live up to their standards, or even those which you impose on yourself. But you can offer yourself as a vehicle for the great gift. You know what that means now, don’t you?” I nodded. “Even a cracked cup can be used to serve the best champagne.”

  He closed his eyes again. I knew he was gone. I didn’t know where. I stood there, arms limp by my sides. Inside, I was bursting with feeling. “Thank you,” I whispered into the silence. His eyes opened suddenly, as if I’d woken him from a dream. “Give thanks by all means,” he said, “but not to me. The thanks you give is in service, and only in that service can you really find the core of all you give thanks for.” He closed his eyes again. “Our work is done. Go now.” As I reached for the door handle, I waited, and looked back at him. I wanted so many things in that moment, yet I knew not one of them was real. I looked at his feet in their white woolen socks, resting one upon the other. I wanted to kneel before him in respect.

  “Go,” he snapped, with eyes closed. “It’s done.” I turned again to the door. I knew, and I knew that he knew, we would not meet again.

  “Only in giving it away,” he whispered, more as if speaking in a dream than to me, “can the gift be fully received.”

  Our house was about 15 minutes from the university district, on a route that I had taken perhaps thousands of times in my life. But I managed to take two wrong turns. It took 45 minutes to get home. I parked across the street and sat in the car, staring at the dashboard. I was churning. I felt I had watched a train pull out of the station. My beloved was traveling with a one-way ticket.

  CHAPTER 25

  CHOCOLATE-COVERED FRIEND

  Two days later I came home from work early. It was a sunny summer day. The kids were in after school care, Becca was down in the basement meeting someone’s advertising deadline. The cleaner had been there that day, the carpet was perfectly vacuumed, the cushions on the sofa freshly pumped up, not a speck of dust anywhere. Better not mess it up before Becca could enjoy the pristine vision. I took a Coke from the fridge and went out on the deck, taking the phone out with me. The kids would get a ride to a friend’s house around the corner and would need to be picked up; the call would come any minute. I looked at Becca’s neat rows of flowers in the beds below. I looked out over the valley at the houses, the routine, the predictability.

  When the phone did ring a few minutes later, it startled me. I had sunk into a reverie, repeating Joey’s last words, like a refrain, for the umpteenth time.

  “He’s gone, Matt,” said a flat British voice.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s gone, Matt. He’s left us.”

  “What do you mean, Alan? Gone where?”

  “There was an accident, Matt, this morning. He’s dead.” I had never heard Alan speak in a monotone before. I hardly recognized him.

  “What happened?” I sat with the news. A part of me had been waiting for this since I left him two days before.

  “After he talked to you that last night, he called Charles in. About fifteen minutes later he emerged with a bag packed and told me he’d be gone for a few days. Charles took him up to Bellingham. The family has quite a place up there; the chocolate factory is on an estate, where they also have a big old house—and an airstrip.” I breathed deeply. “Joey went up for the first time yesterday and took a jump with Charles. They were harnessed together.”

  “And?”

  “All went well; they landed safely. Charles told me they spent the rest of the day and the evening talking. Joey had, apparently, told Charles that he had one day to learn everything Joey had to offer, so they were up late into the night. Today Joey was very insistent about doing a jump alone. Charles was guilt stricken when he called me at lunchtime, said he should never have let him jump alone so quickly, but he felt unable to refuse Joey’s
insistence. We all know that one.

  “Normally they would fly right over the chocolate factory and then jump out of the plane into a field about three miles farther on. But Joey jumped out early, without warning, right above the factory. Charles jumped out immediately behind him, trying to steer him safely down. Charles told me Joey was lost in a state of complete rapture, free falling in space. Joey’s chute opened fine, then he kept steering himself toward the chocolate factory. Charles said he was shouting out to Joey the whole time, to pull on this rope or that, but Joey just looked back at him, laughing, doing the very opposite of what Charles was saying. Tears were streaming down his face, he was letting go of the pull ropes and waving his arms to the side like a bird. ‘This is it, this is it,’ he was calling out. Charles said he’d never seen a face like that in his life, he said it was as though everything was pouring through Joey’s eyes.

  “The factory has a big glass sunroof covering most of it. Joey went straight through the glass. He dropped into a large vat of cooling chocolate.”

  “He drowned in chocolate?”

  “It’s strange,” Alan went on. “The ambulance was there in a few minutes. They’re going to do an autopsy, of course, but they say it seems he was dead before he landed. His heart had stopped beating before he hit the chocolate. He hadn’t inhaled any of it. He must have died in the air, just seconds before he hit the roof, or he wouldn’t have been able to steer himself.

  “They pulled him out, and he was dead. Charlie told me Joey still had a look of utter ecstasy on his face.”

  I waited. There was a pause as we tried our best to feel it all. Joey had died covered in chocolate.

  “A chocolate-covered … ” I spoke my thought aloud.

  “Yes, a chocolate-covered Joey.”

  There was a long somber silence.

  I don’t remember who laughed first. It seemed like the wrong thing to do. But once we started, it went on and on. We laughed, and we laughed, and we laughed. I looked out at Becca’s orderly rows of flowers. They seemed to be laughing, too. The sky was laughing, the birds were laughing. It was the same laugh I could still hear from the last night I had seen him. When I breathed in, it was him, laughing. When I drank my Coke, the bubbles were him laughing, too. As much as the story indicated the contrary, I knew he was not gone. He was more present than he had ever been.

  I picked up the kids. I didn’t tell the family about Joey’s death for a day or two. I did not want to fabricate a tragedy where I knew there wasn’t one. That night Alan called again.

  “How are you making out?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I replied with an inquiring tone. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” The last time I said it like I actually meant it.

  “Well listen. There’s a new lad turned up tonight. Name of Ben. Can’t be more than twenty years old. Joey told me if anyone new came, to send them over to you.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Yep. That’s what he said. He’s on his way.”

  “He’s on his what?”

  The doorbell brought the answer. I went to the door, with Alan still in my ear on the phone.

  “Come in. Why don’t you … uh …” I was fumbling here, “wait in my office.”

  It was really a storage room: boxes, discarded kids’ toys, a makeshift bookshelf, and a computer in the corner. He sat in the only chair.

  “What am I supposed to do with him?” I whispered to Alan once I could escape to the kitchen.

  “I imagine Joey thought you would know the answer to that question, or he wouldn’t have had me send the lad to you.” He hung up.

  I went back in to the room again. Ben was certainly young. He tried to offer me the chair, but I persuaded him that I always prefer to conduct such interviews while sitting on the desk. His hair was tied back in a ponytail, a wispy beard was probably original growth. He seemed ill at ease, like he thought he had come at a bad time. He glanced at the door now and then, as if to see if it were locked. I tried to think of something to say to reassure him he was welcome.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” finally came to mind.

  He brightened. “I’m sorry, I got lost.” He had taken my welcome as a reprimand for keeping me waiting.

  “You are not late; you are right on time,” I offered. I wanted to say that I was totally here, that I had all the time in the world. Eternity.

  “No, I’ve been waiting for you … ,” how to put this, “forever.”

  I could feel his discomfort as if from the inside. He seemed like a younger but otherwise identical version of me only the year before. He glanced at the door again, and then fumbled with his watch. I knew that if he kept still for more than 30 seconds he would cry. And that just now every cell of his body was bent on resisting that. He wanted to run away from everything, just like I had.

  “You cannot run away anymore,” I said, feeling my belly relax now. He had ended up in my storage room, just as I had ended up at Joey’s. “Something has brought you to this place; there is nowhere left for you to run.”

  And sure enough, he started to cry. And then it all came pouring out. His parents were getting a divorce, his father had been drinking. His grades at school had gone downhill the last year, and he finally dropped out of college. His girlfriend left him, after calling him a loser, and took up with the football captain. And to cap it all, he developed a skin rash that had resisted all treatment. He had moved out from his home, now his mother’s house, just a few weeks before, and was staying with a friend on the floor.

  The skin rash was an extra touch, but otherwise I could empathize to a T. “You are lucky; you have no idea how fortunate you are to face all this at your age.” I was feeling very relaxed, as totally sure of anything as I had ever been. “You have to pass through this kind of a death for a new life to come. It may be hard to see it right now, but if you can stay with it, you will find blessing in all that you speak of.”

  A tiny spark came into the boy’s eyes. He seemed to me to be hardly older than Dom, asleep upstairs. He leaned forward … and slightly knitted his brows.

  “It’s time to let things die now, things as they have been, but it is a death you can learn to welcome. There is life on the other side of despair. I have been just where you are, not long ago.”

  “What do I need to do?” He looked at me with a trust that seemed almost unnatural. The fact that we were surrounded by empty computer boxes and cleaning supplies did not apparently detract from the sacredness of the moment for Ben.

  “Okay,” I said, taking a breath and a dive into the unknown. “You have told me your story. You talked about ‘my life,’ ‘my parents,’ ‘my school,’ ‘my girlfriend,’ ‘my pain,’ ‘my problems.’ But who is the ‘I’? What is the ‘I‘ you talk about? Have you ever seen this thing you call ‘me’? See if you can find it for real now.”

  He looked confused, but unperturbed. “I am me,” he said, with a rise at the end of the sentence that made it sound more of a question than a statement. He waited, innocently. “I am Ben.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Me. I am me. I am Ben. But these are words. Very familiar words. Every word points to something. What does the word I point to?”

  I looked around for something to make my point. There was a Mr. Potato Head, in a box Becca must have been keeping for the thrift store. “See this?” I asked, tapping it on the brow.

  “Yes, I believe that is a Mr. Potato Head,” Ben replied, looking serious and focused now. If his salvation was to be found in broken plastic toys, then he was all in.

  “Mr. Potato Head. That’s a name, isn’t it? And there is a plastic thing here, to which the name is pointing.”

  “It is missing one ear and one arm,” he quickly pointed out.

  “And do you see this?” I asked, holding up a broken grey screen with a red frame.

  “Etch A Sketch,” he replied in dead earnest.

  “We say a word, and it points to something. Each name has an object that it labels, like a signpost p
ointing to a city. The signpost is not the city. The city is not the signpost. One points to the other.”

  He started to look a little impatient.

  “Now can you see this toy airplane?” I asked, miming the act of flying an airplane through empty space.

  “Nothing there,” he replied.

  “Good. Now try to find this ‘I,’ this ‘me,’ that you talk about.”

  The whole thing was over in about 15 minutes. Ben ended up as wide-eyed and legless as I had been a year and a half before.

  He moved into our house ten days later, and occupied that same storage room where we had our first meeting. Every few weeks Alan would send along someone new, and we would meet on the patio or in the kitchen, or go for a walk in the park nearby. After a few months we began to meet, all of us, now and then, for an evening. And so it was, without really noticing, that I came to earn all that Joey had given to me.

  In giving it all away, I learned how to receive the gift I had been given.

  EPILOGUE

  “I was sleeping every night under a bench in the west wing of the Buenos Aires central railway station.” The short, stocky Argentinean woman speaks in a high-pitched South American accent. Gray curls hang in a chaotic mop loosely on her shoulders, huge colorful earrings like peacock feathers droop from her ears. The bright sequins covering her dress turn her into a loud human firework.

  “He found me one night. He saved me. I was only fifteen.” Her mouth quivers. She pulls out an ornate handkerchief and fingers it nervously. “He saved me from myself. I used to go to restaurants and cafés to sing to earn a little money. He heard me one of those nights. Only two years later I was singing in the Argentinean National Opera.” She dabs her eyes, then flashes them at a balding man in a dark gray suit, doing all he can to appear fascinated. She takes a deep breath.

  “And who would have thought that I, Fernanda Zapiola,” she straightens her posture, “would become one of the most sought-after opera singers in South America?”

  I whisper an “excuse me” as I step around her there, in the doorway. The main reception room of the Pendleton County Country Club is already looking full; 60 or 70 people are gathered into small clusters. The colonial building, with its ornate paneling rising halfway up the walls, its dark hardwood floors, mahogany furniture, hyacinths, exudes old-world stability. Trophies and photographs around the room commemorate the athletic achievements of muscular young men, almost certainly all dead now, or at least long forgotten. One photograph, larger than the rest, has been added just for today. The black-and-white picture, mounted onto hardboard, sits on the mantelpiece above the marble fireplace. Joey’s deep penetrating eyes seem to overshadow everything else in the room.